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Month: September 2008

It was a sad day yesterday. Morse, a part of my family for 11 years, died suddenly. In many ways it’s a blessing. He was very much loved and didn’t suffer at the end. One minute he was with us, the next he’d gone.

Never overly affectionate, he knew when he wanted things like clockwork and never let you forget who was boss. He was the pioneer of ‘The Human Catflap’: a technique where you keep walking up to near where Linz and I live to say ‘There’s no answer from those folks upstairs, here, come follow me and let me in’. We’d invariably ignore him the first time, when he’d come back again, act all cute nearer to us this time and when we’d inevitably go and try and give him a stroke, he’d be off up the path. Cunning lad was our Morse.

Forever rolling over on the ground to show just how cute he could be, he was a lovely cat.

Like Martin Clunes said of dogs recently in his ITV1 documentary, the bond we get with dogs and cats is often bordering on the irrational. However for all of the demands they make of us, the love we get back from seeing them stick around and seek us out is enough to melt our hearts for every day they are with us.

We all miss you Morse, including your brother Paddy. Farewell dear friend.

It’s amazing what a weekend stuck in a loft can achieve. No, I don’t mean the arms full of fiberglass we got (apparently a tip is to cover yourself in talcum powder first).

A fibre of a different kind ended up creating a magical star ceiling for my brother’s soon-to-be-completed home cinema.

Attention to detail in planning is never overlooked and he’d written a C# program to randomly generate a star field which took into account the joist locations.

So we had a round of ‘Stars in their eyes’ on Saturday where we auditioned starfields and finally came up with a winner. Not only did this software generate a GIF of the starfield but also a CSV file of coordinates that we used from the loft space above to detemine where we drilled.

Add in some HomeEasy automation kit from B&Q and he’s got one funky ceiling that also colour changes. Also as the fibres are clear, when you turn it off you can’t see any evidence of them!

Job well done as you can hopefully see! The first image is the view from the loft with no lights on except the fibreoptics. The second is the ceiling from below.

Just in case you’ve managed to miss the spectacle that is Joss Whedon’s ‘Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog’ then you really are missing out. With the release of the soundtrack on iTunes UK today you really have no excuse not to get caught up in the magic.

A project born from the Writer’s Strike in the US, Joss and his talented crew and cast have produced one of an internet viral video that oozes quality from every frame.

Go visit the official site where you can watch the video via Hulu.com [update: only if you’re in the US. Damn copyright issues]. Can’t wait for the DVD release so we can continue to fund these good people. A diamond in the spam, for sure.